FOUR

Summer heat and humidity gave the small town of Cumberland Gap a drowsy, peaceful feel, with clear blue sky above the thickly leaved branches of the tall oaks. Tall, steep hills towered over the town, covering much of it in shadow.

In a small apartment suite above a store, near the window that overlooked the corner of the town square, Carson Pierce sat in a worn stuffed chair, watching a physician, sitting on a bed in the center of the room, tend to Jordan’s wounds.

Pierce wore jeans and a loose black T-shirt that did a moderate job of hiding how muscular he was. Forty, he could pass for thirty. Any traces of advanced age could be found in his world-weary eyes, a blue so pale they verged on gray. He’d started his career outside the law, so talented that he’d been recruited by the government. Now inside the law, Washington-trained for covert missions, he operated no differently than he had at the top of one of the most ruthless gangs in New York. The only thing that had changed was his objectives.

This was just another assignment to him, and as badly as he wanted to return to the freedom of Outside, he couldn’t until it was finished.

Three days of chase, and the objective was in front of him. A fugitive on a makeshift bed, dying. Jordan Brown. Pierce had no sympathy for the injured man, who had slipped into Appalachia years ago to avoid warrants for murder, arson, and intelligence crimes.

The physician leaning over the man clucked an indiscriminate sound of judgment and stood.

“I can’t guess how long it might be until this man is conscious again,” Dr. Ross said. Ten years younger than Pierce, he looked twenty years older. Pudgy, soft hands. “What exactly happened to him?”

“Fell.” Pierce was still furious about that. When they’d finally trapped the man, despite clear orders, Mason Lee had signaled one of the bounty hunters to release his dogs, driving the man backward over the cliff. The fugitive had dropped to a ledge in the dark; it had taken an hour to pull him back up, then hours of night travel back down the mountain to where he’d found the local sheriff and demanded a place to keep the man.

“Hard to believe all this was just from a fall,” Dr. Ross said. “He’s ripped up, like an animal got hold of him.”

The dogs had been savage, and the bounty hunters slow to pull them off. Last night, when Pierce and one of the Appalachian bounty hunters carried Jordan in, he had been conscious, occasionally screaming in pain. If the man was going to die, Pierce wanted information first. Pierce didn’t like using torture; he’d hoped pharmaceuticals would do it, but Jordan had fallen unconscious too soon after Pierce had gotten him into the apartment.

“I doubt you’re a stupid man,” Pierce said to the physician. “Does this really seem like the kind of situation you want to ask questions about?”

“From a medical viewpoint, I need—”

“You need to set his bones, stop the bleeding, and find a way to get him to open his eyes again. Nothing more.”

“I will not be intimidated,” Dr. Ross said.

It surprised Pierce. The physician looked softer than that.

“Sheriff Carney tells me you have a seven-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son.” Pierce walked to the window. “The less you know, the better for them. Your silence buys them a lot of protection.”

The threat was a bluff. While other Outside agents had no compunction about abusing their training and authority, Pierce would not hurt the innocent, especially children. He remembered how his parents had died, futilely trying to protect his sister. He saw his memories in black and white, his parents’ spilled blood like dark oil.

Pierce was confident, however, that his bluff would not be called. Because Sheriff Carney had sent Dr. Ross, it would be obvious that Pierce had the sheriff’s official support, which meant implicit support from Bar Elohim. Small town like this, the physician would know about the bounty hunters that Pierce had hired and had probably heard one of them was the feared and legendary Mason Lee. Bounty hunters did not travel without that same official endorsement from Bar Elohim.

Dr. Ross closed his eyes for a few seconds. Muscles quivered at the side of his jaws. He opened his eyes again and met Pierce’s steady gaze. It was a pleasant surprise for Pierce. He appreciated men with true strength. The physician was not afraid, Pierce could tell, but he wasn’t a fool either, so he didn’t vocalize his protest.

Dr. Ross knelt beside the dying man and opened the satchel he’d brought into the suite for this house call.

He pulled out a hypodermic needle and syringe filled with clear liquid, tapped it to rid it of air bubbles. With a cotton swab and disinfectant, the doctor prepared Jordan’s shoulder for an injection.

Pierce had no interest in how the physician intended to bring the man back to consciousness, so he looked out the window again, noticing below and across the street the sheriff on a bench beside a huge man with a boyish, innocent face.

Pierce gave the two of them little more thought. His mind was on wrapping up the assignment. Capturing the girl.

They’d found the blouse that Jordan had been using to draw the hounds. Somewhere along the way, she must have made it down the face of the rock. The valley was narrow enough that Mason Lee and the dogs would pick up her scent eventually.

Pierce hoped she would be found alive. She deserved that chance after all that had been done to her.

Yet he knew this would not be possible. She might not have survived the climb down. Or, more likely, she would not survive Mason Lee, armed with his legendary shotgun and an equally legendary lack of discrimination in its use. If Mason found her, he had a dry-ice canister, with very specific harvesting instructions. Pierce would have preferred to handle it himself, but he needed to be here if the man on the bed became conscious again.

All things considered, the assignment should be wrapped up in a day or two. If the fugitive talked, Pierce would learn more about where he sent the girl and why. It might be helpful. At the least, it could lead to more arrests, but that was simply to help the Appalachians. It was part of the agreement that Bar Elohim had brokered with Pierce’s employers to allow Pierce inside.

Pierce didn’t really care about the politics. His concern was simply to fulfill his assignment, then return Outside. Back to where it was normal.

Pierce moved away from the window, and his eyes were drawn back to the torn man on the bed. His blood had soaked through the bandages, and in the light of the room, it seemed as black as the blood in Pierce’s memories.